Barely a month old, she fell into an ice age muddy river some 40,000 years ago, where a biological twist of fate led to her being almost perfectly preserved. Astonishing pictures show Lyuba, named after the wife of the reindeer herder who discovered her in 2007 on the Yamal peninsula in Siberia. Missing only her hair and toenails, Lyuba is the best discovered example yet of a woolly mammoth spat from its tomb deep in the Russian permafrost.

An extinct group of elephants, woolly mammoths emerged some 400,000 years ago and died out perhaps just 10,000 years ago. In an echo of modern concerns about climate change, some blame their fate on a natural upswing in temperature that altered vegetation. Others accuse early human hunters. Because many mammoths became quickly wrapped in frozen sediment after they died, many of their remains have survived in the Siberian deep freeze.

Lyuba has seen quite a bit of action since her discovery. She was immediately carted off to be sold for two snowmobiles and a year's supply of food, and ended up leaning against a wall being gnawed by stray dogs. Since her recovery, she has been scraped, drilled and sliced by a series of bewitched experts and sent to Japan for a CT scan. Her story and the pictures appear in the May issue of National Geographic magazine.

Could Lyuba help scientists recreate her lost kin? It's unlikely. While she looks well preserved, on a molecular level Lyuba is in tatters. Her cells - and crucially her DNA - will be battered by 40,000 years of steady damage. The lack of an intact nucleus makes cloning à la Dolly the sheep impossible.

There is another way. Last autumn, scientists in the US published a first draft of the woolly mammoth's genome, which is thought to be about 80% complete. Such genetic sequences could, in theory, be used to assemble enough DNA from scratch to clone the beast. One problem is that scientists do not know how to arrange it as chromosomes, or even how many chromosomes mammoths had. Lyuba took that secret to her freezing grave.